Beyond the Borders

Beyond the Borders. A Journey Through the Hidden Life of an Author

Rudi Meulemans first read about Glenway Wescott (1901-1987) in an essay by Susan Sontag, and became fascinated by the American author, who had been a friend of E.M. Forster, Truman Capote, Jean Cocteau, Isadora Duncan, Henri Matisse and William Somerset Maugham. Besides his life companion Monroe Wheeler (director of the Museum of Modern Art), Wescott had many lovers, including the photographer George Platt Lynes, and Dr Alfred Kinsey, with whom he pushed the boundaries of sexuality.

In his youth, Wescott published three bestsellers – and then stopped. Although no more of his work was published, he continued to write for the rest of his life. His diaries, letters and loose pages of notes are kept in Yale University’s Beinecke Library. That is where Rudi Meulemans went in search of Glenway Wescott. There, he discovered an alternative family, an ‘aristocracy of the sensitive’.

‘Beyond the Borders’ is an account of a fascinating literary pilgrimage that right from the very first page whisks the reader away to a now-forgotten literary and artistic world in America before and after the Second World War. Gradually, the lives of Meulemans and Wescott become ever more intertwined. Is friendship beyond death possible?